It's a cinema zeitgeist thing; you see it quite a bit from year to year.

KS: We've got four filmmakers who grew up watching those movies and now it's kind-of influencing the flicks that they've just done.

Cinema seems to regenerate itself in that way; back in the Clerks days you had the Richard Linklater stuff too and that was very much the flavour of indie cinema at the time. Even at the Academy Awards, the films have always tended to check the same boxes, but from year to year you can find complementary projects being released.

KS: Right. But as far as the formula goes, this year hasn't been quite so obvious. This year is the first year for me that I feel like the Best Picture award truly went to what I felt was the best picture of last year. I loved Departed, it was my favourite film of last year, and when it wound up winning best picture I'm like, "Holy sh*t, every once in a while, it happens!"

Plus it was a real moment that Martin Scorsese finally got his hands on one of those statues.

KS: And it's one of those moments too where you realise that he got skipped over for Raging Bull, he got skipped over for Goodfellas, you feel like sometimes the Academy rewards people after the fact for performances that were better in the previous film. Like Jeremy Irons gets overlooked for Dead Ringers but they give him the award for playing Claus von Bülow in Reversal of Fortune. A couple of years before the dude is in Dead Ringers where he has to play two distinctly different characters and it's a tour-de-force performance that just kind-of gets overlooked.

Martin Scorsese, though, that was the first time in recent memory where they finally gave an Oscar to somebody, after passing him over time and again for strong work, for work that's just as strong. He did a fantastic f*cking job.

And it's great, too, because everyone assumed The Aviator would be his year. In retrospect, you're glad that he didn't pick it up then because the moment means so much more when it's really, truly deserved in that year.

KS: It's a dude winning an award for a genre in which he's previously shown great chops.



Definitely. Taxi Driver always weirded me out though because I really can't see how Rocky is even possibly the better film.

KS: Considering the United States, though, it's easy to see. Rocky is an underdog story and that appeals to everybody. Taxi Driver is about alienation and anger and people don't want to embrace that as much as they want to embrace a dude from nowhere who can pull himself up by his bootstraps and become something. The movie is tailor-made to be embraced by Americans. It's embraceable by almost anybody, really, but particularly Americans. And the story behind the story is almost tailor-made for that as well inasmuch as Sylvester Stallone was a struggling actor himself and put this thing together on the cheap and boom it explodes out of anonymity.

It's the same thing with Ben and Matt in Good Will Hunting. Not only is it a great story about overcoming adversity but the back-story is these two dudes who couldn't get cast in movies wrote themselves dream parts with a brilliant script; you want to reward not only the brilliant script but the dudes for succeeding.

It still amazes me that those guys weren't big before Good Will Hunting based on the fact that they'd been acting for a while and they're very, very pretty.

KS: Matt had definitely fared better than Ben inasmuch as he had Courage Under Fire before Good Will Hunting came out, and it was a pretty big part. Rainmaker was shot before Good Will Hunting came out too. But yeah, it's very strange.

Damon was the bomb in Rounders.

KS: Rounders is an imminently watchable movie. I can pop that flick in and watch that anytime. I'm never bored by that movie. Although, again, that movie didn't work for me first time around. Second time I saw it I was like, "This is fantastic."

It's such a go-to movie that you can just pop in and that's really a testament to those two lead performances. Ed Norton is a fascinating character to watch and Matt is a fascinating character to watch as well.

Most of the poker pros today got interested in the game watching Rounders.

KS: Totally. Basically Texas Hold 'Em exploded from that movie. And it didn't happen right away. That movie came out and didn't even do that well - I think Rounders topped off at $19 to $25 million - but within three years of that movie's release suddenly Texas Hold 'Em became so insanely popular and it has to be traced back to Rounders because it introduced people to that game; to that particular instance of poker.

John Malkovich is brilliant in that movie.

KS: He's f*cking fantastic in that movie. That's a dude you can watch in almost anything, he always has something interesting to offer.

Dinner and the Movies was a conversation between filmmaker Kevin Smith and RT-UK editor Joe Utichi at The Dorchester Hotel, London, Friday 6th April 2007. Many thanks to Gail Stanley for her help with organisation.